the Senate stationery store. Two years
later, when McLaughlin was packing to
leave for Iraq under McCoys command,
he put the flag in his duffel.
During the invasion, McLaughlin
tried to raise the flag several times. On
the first attempt, he was preparing to
hoist it on top of a building but realized
that there was too much shooting go-
ing on. Another time, Lambert's M-88
rolled over the flagpole that McLaughlin
was about to use. McLaughlin's efforts
became an inside joke in his tank com-
pany. When McCoy ordered the top-
pling in Firdos Square, Captain Lewis
told McLaughlin to fetch his flag for the
mother of all flag pictures. Soon it was
handed up to Corporal Edward Chin,
who had climbed atop the M-88's crane
and was hooking a chain around the stat-
uè shead.
"I remember thinking, What am I
going to do?" Chin told me. "I didn't
want to just wave the flag." At that mo-
ment, the wind blew the flag and it stuck
to the statuè s head. "That worked for me.
I later realized the flag was upside down.
That is actually a symbol of distress."
McCoy, too busy to keep an eye on
the statue, wasn't looking when the flag
went up. People watching TV from their
sofas in America saw it before he did.
When he finally looked up, his first
thought was Oh, shit! An American flag
would seem like a symbol of occupation.
He instantly ordered it taken down.
Around this time, McCoys superior,
Colonel Hummer, got an
urgent order from his com-
mander, Major General
J ames Mattis, who had ap-
parently received an urgent
order that Hummer as-
sumes originated at the
Pentagon.
Get the flag down.
Now.
With the breeze keep-
ing the flag in place, Chin had returned
to his rigging work. As he was finishing
up, he took the flag down of his own
volition. It had been on display for just a
minute and a hili There had not been
time for the orders to reach him.
One of the battalion's lieutenants,
Casey Kuhlman, had also realized that
the American flag would not be a wel-
come symbol for Iraqis and other Arabs.
Kuhlman had acquired an Iraqi flag dur-
"
ing the invasion. "I grabbed it and started
going up to the statue," he recalled. "And
I didn't get but ten or twenty metres
when an older Iraqi man grabbed it from
me and it sort of got passed through the
crowd and then went up. I thought, My
souvenir is gone. But this is a little bit
better than a souvenir."
His flag helped create one of the Fir-
dos myths.
Staff Sergeant Brian Plesich, the leader
of an Army psychological-operations
team, arrived at Firdos after the sledge-
hammer-and-rope phase had begun. He
saw the American flag go up and had the
same reaction as Kuhlman: get an Iraqi
flag up. Plesich, whom I interviewed last
year, told his interpreter to find an Iraqi
flag. The interpreter waded into the
crowd, and soon an Iraqi flag was raised.
Plesich assumed that the Iraqi flag
had got there because of his initiative,
and in 2004 the Army published a report
crediting him. The report was picked up
by the news media ("ARMYSTAGE-MAN-
AGED FALL OF HUSSEIN STATUE," the
headline in the Los Angeles Times read)
and circulated widely on the Web, fuel-
ling the conspiracy notion that a psyops
team masterminded not only the Iraqi
flag but the entire toppling. Yet it was
Kuhlman who was responsible for the
flag. Plesich's impact at Firdos was lim-
ited to using the loudspeakers on his
Humvee to tell the crowd, once the
statue had been rigged to fall, that until
everyone moved back to a safe distance
the main event would not
take place.
By the time it was over
and the sun was setting at
Firdos Square, Sergeant
Lambert and his M -88
crew had become so famous
that even Katie Couric
wanted an interview. Lam-
bert had to hide from the
spectacle he had unleashed.
"God's honest truth," Lambert told
me. 'We went inside the 88, we locked
the hatches, and the only time we would
come out was when we were directed to."
48 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 10,2011
T he Palestine was built in the early
nineteen-eighties for tourists, who
were then visiting Iraq in large numbers,
and it was run by the Méridien hotel
chain. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, in
1990, and was slapped with international
sanctions, the Méridien got rid of its out-
law franchise. The Palestine, with more
than three hundred rooms and seventeen
floors, stayed open under state control
but was outclassed by the AI Rasheed
Hotel, which stood on the other side of
the Tigris and was surrounded by gov-
ernment ministries and Presidential pal-
aces. For years, the AI Rasheed was fa-
vored by foreign journalists who wanted
to be close to the action, but they moved
out just before the invasion, to get away
from the bombs that would presumably
destroy the government district. When
the Shock and Awe campaign began, a
couple of hundred reporters watched
from their balconies at the Palestine.
Like everyone else, Pentagon officials
viewed TV reports from Baghdad which
often noted that the Palestine was the
point ofbroadcast. It was at the hotel that
the Information Minister Mohammed
Saeed al-Sahhaf, known as Baghdad
Bob, held many of his extravagant press
conferences.
During the aerial bombardment of
Baghdad, the Palestine was not hit, and,
once ground troops had moved into the
city, most commanders in Baghdad were
made aware of the Palestine's do-not-
bomb status. But the commanders failed
to convey the information to the soldiers
in every unit, and this caused the casual-
ties that contributed to the dispatch of
McCoys battalion to Firdos Square.
On April 8th, the day before McCoys
battalion arrived at Firdos, an Army tank
that was on the AI Jumhuriya Bridge,
over the Tigris, fired a shell at the Pales-
tine, killing two journalists and injuring
three others. The tanKs crew mistakenly
thought that a camera aimed at them
from a balcony was a spotting device for
Iraqi forces. Journalists at the Palestine
were outraged; some thought it was a de-
liberate attack on the media. Subsequent
investigations by the military and report-
ers found that although key officers on
the ground, including brigade and battal-
ion commanders, knew that the Pales-
tine should not be fired on, they did not
know the hoter s precise location, be-
cause, as McCoy was to learn, it wasn't
marked on their maps. The tanKs crew
did not know that journalists were in the
building.
The killings increased media pressure
on the Pentagon to insure the hoter s
safety; calls and e-mails to Pentagon